December 2022 Reading Wrap-Up

“Everyone wants to know how we can predict death.”

First line in The First to Die at the End by Adam Silvera

Happy New Year!! 2022 is officially over but I still need to talk about it a little bit. First of all, I need to celebrate having survived December because work and the weather meant that fact wasn’t a given. I work outside and it has been so cold! And snowy! I generally don’t approve of snow but I’ll amend that and say snow is allowed if there’s only a little of it and the sun shines immediately after until the snow is gone again. Because that’s super pretty! We had a couple of days of that and I definitely didn’t hate my job during those.
The weather that’s not allowed, though? The temperature is one or two degrees above freezing and then it starts raining because do you know what happens then? The rain turns to ice as it hits the ground and then I hit the ground because the ice came out of nowhere!!!
Finally, I also had to survive the Christmas party with my colleagues and the interesting aspect comes from the fact that I primarily work with men (like, we were three women at that party and one went home early). It was still fun as long as I remembered to turn my hearing off once in a while. The worst part actually came when I was forced to participate in someone else’s idea of entertainment. Two teams were competing against each other in a lot of stuff meant to make us look stupid and I had definitely not had enough alcohol at that point. But I still got through it without combusting in a heap of anxiety.

Did I read in December, though? Actually yes! Quite a bit more than expected considering my schedule.

This just looks good. I read a normal amount, I completely balanced YA and Adult, and I had a pretty high average rating. Reading more than 70 books in a year is also a huge accomplishment for me!
But let’s just get on with the reviews of the six books I read in the final month of 2022!

Bitterblue (Graceling Realm #3)

My thoughts

I’ve committed the mortal sin of reading a series out of order because I have not read the first two books in the Graceling Realm. For some completely unidentifiable reason, the world didn’t end and I thoroughly enjoyed Bitterblue. It was so magnificently dark and really dealt with some heavy topics that aren’t often explored in YA fantasy. I think that’s also what made me very invested in the mystery of the book. Horrific things in the past seem to still affect Bitterblue and the people around her but there’s so much secrecy about why that is exactly. The darkness of the book made sure I had a hard time guessing what was going on. I couldn’t predict how far Cashore was willing to go and I loved that.

I also really loved the characters because they were so far from perfect. And Cashore didn’t try and make them look like they were. Like, the good guys will hit each other when they’re mad and not immediately make up. Showing a character doing something irrational in anger and actually allowing that flaw to exist is something that makes them so real and it kept me wanting more.

The River of Silver

My thoughts

My overall rating is 3 stars but everything that involved Jamshid was 5 stars in terms of my enjoyment, of course. Still, as much as loved getting more of Jamshid, I don’t recommend this unless you’re a huge fan of The Daevabad Trilogy and so must read absolutely everything about it. I even hesitate to call these short STORIES because only one really has the feel of one. It’s more just deleted scenes and only scenes where people are just talking. They’re not doing anything in most of these scenes and while some of the conversations are interesting enough, you can tell they weren’t allowed to matter because, well, they were cut and deemed unnecessary the first time around. So I think the conclusion is that you can skip this one unless you simply cannot function without reading more about these characters.

The First to Die at the End (Death-Cast #0)

My thoughts

I’ve recently read another book by Adam Silvera, Here’s To Us, and maybe that was a mistake because now I feel like I’ve read the same book twice. The characters felt very similar and both are set in New York, a place Silvera apparently loves a lot so it’s an important part of both books. The reason I felt both were just fine might be that I don’t love Silvera’s writing as much as I used to. This one felt especially sappy and the audiobook didn’t help with that. Like, the characters were constantly feeling sorry for themselves and I’m just not into that.

This prequel shows us how Death-Cast started and how the world reacted to knowing who was going to die, which was definitely the most interesting part of the book. It gives us POVs from other than the two main characters, and I thought the ones from the creator of Death-Cast were very fascinating! I wouldn’t have minded a book just from his perspective. Still, the main story is the romance (again insta-love because we only have 24 hours) so I think it missed going deeper into the possible societal changes such an invention would bring about. But yeah, if you love Silvera, you’ll probably like this one too.

UnDivided (Unwind Dystology #4)

My thoughts

I’m so relieved that I loved this series’ ending after feeling lukewarm about books two and three. I’m still not sure those were needed for us to get this ending but I don’t care because this one made me just as excited as the first book. I think the pacing was back on track and I could easily follow why I needed to read each scene. There was always a clear direction to the plot so I wasn’t bored at any point.

And I just really loved how the very end came about. I had kind of predicted what would happen but somehow the execution of it kept me hooked and still had me super emotional. I don’t really know what else to say since this is the final book in a four-book series. I can only highly recommend this if you’re into dystopia-like settings where the author speculates on what society and humanity can turn into.

The Unhoneymooners

Synopsis: Olive is always unlucky: in her career, in love, in…well, everything. Her identical twin sister Ami, on the other hand, is probably the luckiest person in the world. Her meet-cute with her fiancé is something out of a romantic comedy (gag) and she’s managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a series of Internet contests (double gag). Worst of all, she’s forcing Olive to spend the day with her sworn enemy, Ethan, who just happens to be the best man.

Olive braces herself to get through 24 hours of wedding hell before she can return to her comfortable, unlucky life. But when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning from eating bad shellfish, the only people who aren’t affected are Olive and Ethan. And now there’s an all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Hawaii up for grabs.

Putting their mutual hatred aside for the sake of a free vacation, Olive and Ethan head for paradise, determined to avoid each other at all costs. But when Olive runs into her future boss, the little white lie she tells him is suddenly at risk to become a whole lot bigger. She and Ethan now have to pretend to be loving newlyweds, and her luck seems worse than ever. But the weird thing is that she doesn’t mind playing pretend. In fact, she feels kind of… lucky.

Goodreads

My thoughts

Take my rating of 3.5 with a grain of salt because I’m not completely sure it’s correct. For the most part, I really liked this book. I wasn’t considering 5 stars but it was a solid 4 stars until it went completely off the rails. But I’m getting back to that because, like I said, I liked a lot of what this book did. My favorite thing was probably the writing of the dialogue which has some amazing snippets of dry humor in there that just had me grinning despite listening to this in public. Like, I really don’t think this is my last Christina Lauren book because I do enjoy their writing very much.

Did I like the romance? Well, it was fun and the characters felt somewhat unique with their very distinct personalities. But I’m probably also going to have forgotten about them and their romance in a couple of months. Still, reading about them was a good experience. That is until I reached the final 40 minutes of the audiobook. What the hell happened?!? I can’t say too much of course, but we were cruising toward an ending I would have LOVED but then we got a trainwreck instead. It’s a hard pass from here!

The Tangled Lands

My thoughts

Individual ratings of the novellas:
The Alchemist – 5 stars
The Executionesss – 4 stars
The Children of Khaim – 4 stars
The Blacksmith’s Daughter – 3 stars

The Tangled Lands is a collection of four novellas set in the city of Khaim, a place where the use of magic has consequences. The city is being taken over by bramble that is deadly to touch and this bramble grows every time someone uses magic within the city. Which is, like, one of the coolest premises I’ve ever read about. However, I only felt that the first novella really took advantage of that. It was by far my favorite with an awesome plot twist and it kind of felt like a prologue to a full-length novel that I would definitely read.

The other three stories felt more contained and I had hoped this backdrop of the dangerous Khaim would bind them together more. Like, the first story felt like a setup for the others but that continuity didn’t follow through. Still, if you’re in the mood for fantasy novellas, I highly recommend this because the premise is just captivating. I also think the authors did a great job of connecting some social commentary to it, especially in terms of class differences.

That was it for my final wrap-up of 2022! A rather successful month, I’d say. Please let me know if you’ve read any of the books and what your thoughts are, and then I hope you all have a great 2023!